The government’s failure to publish its Defence Investment Plan has undermined the UK’s credibility with its allies and weakened its ability to deter adversaries, the Public Accounts Committee has warned in a report on the Ministry of Defence’s 2024-25 accounts, the UK Defence Journal understands.
The committee, which scrutinises government spending on behalf of Parliament, found that the long-delayed plan, intended to set out how the department will invest rising defence budgets, risked squandering the opportunities offered by new technology and was hampering efforts to modernise the armed forces. The continuing lack of a deliverable plan was “seriously undermining the Department’s efforts to modernise the Armed Forces and achieve value for money for the taxpayer”, it said. It noted that three years had passed since the department published its 2023-2033 Equipment Plan, in which the committee had at the time found no credible plan to deliver the capabilities the government wanted, and that it had expressed extreme disappointment a year ago at the continued absence of a replacement.
The committee attributed the delay to the department not having decided which capabilities, infrastructure and people it needs to make the armed forces ready for warfighting within the available budget, and to its failure to secure the cross-government agreement the plan requires. It set out a series of consequences, including a weaker deterrent, a need to recover credibility with allies, armed forces not equipped for the modern battlefield, damaged standing with the defence sector, added cost pressures on the budget and harm to industry, with smaller companies suffering most.
The chair of the committee, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, said the problem ran deeper than the recent delay. “From this Committee’s point of view, the nation has now in fact gone years without a credible plan for UK military capability,” he said. “Excuses to the effect of ‘taking the time to get the details right’ simply do not cut it. Whatever the content of the DIP when it eventually does appear, the damage from its absence has been done.”
He said any minister seeking to explain away the delay “should instead ask themselves what message the bureaucratic drift of the past months has given to the public, as well as the UK’s allies and its adversaries, and simply apologise”. The plan had, he added, become “the most anticipated document in my entire political career”, and, awaiting its publication, “this had better be good”.
The report also delivered a sharp verdict on the troubled Ajax armoured vehicle programme. It found the department was placing unrealistic expectations on how soldiers could safely operate the vehicle while noise and vibration problems remained unresolved, after 33 soldiers reported symptoms during an exercise in November 2025, five of whom were still under medical review when officials gave evidence in March 2026. Clifton-Brown said the committee had been “frankly astounded to hear officials explain that proper use of Ajax requires maintenance checks every time it is stopped”, calling the advice an insult to intelligence.
On the department’s accounts, the committee said it was “completely unacceptable that the Department failed to maintain accounting records to support more than £6 billion of assets”, which meant the accounts did not give a true and fair view of its finances. The problem stemmed from the misclassification of historic spending by the Atomic Weapons Establishment, some of it dating back to 2007, as expenditure that had built infrastructure.
The committee turned too to the department’s growing nuclear spending, which reached 18 per cent of the defence budget, or £10.9 billion, in 2024-25 and is expected to rise towards a quarter in the coming years. It welcomed an agreement to set up a mechanism for greater parliamentary scrutiny of nuclear programmes, whose costs it said were currently too opaque for Parliament to challenge, and warned that political uncertainty must not be allowed to delay those arrangements.
On a more positive note, the report acknowledged that recruitment and retention appeared to have turned a corner, with more people joining the armed forces than leaving in the year to October 2025, though it cautioned that the department did not know whether its own measures had caused the improvement or whether it could be sustained. The committee made recommendations across each of these areas, seeking action from the department on the timescales set out in the report.
